Public health informatics

INTRODUCTION: Hospitals play a potentially crucial role in public health, and social media can be powerful tools to reach their target audiences but are hospitals exploiting them to their full potential? METHODS: We retrieved the institutional webpages and the social media profiles (Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn, WhatsApp and Telegram) of all Italian public hospitals located in regional capitals ( N  = 194). From 1 March to 30 April 2022, we analysed these profiles, noting the number of followers and of posts published, the date of the last post, and the availability of a social media policy...

Recent improvements in the accessibility of mapping tools and an increased recognition of the importance of leveraging data to inform public health operations has led to enthusiasm among public health departments to rapidly evolve their ability to analyze and apply data to programs. As the COVID-19 pandemic made evident, many health department data systems have been neglected for decades and data literacy among staff low. Significant federal dollars have been allocated to local health departments to modernize health systems...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1093/jamiaopen/ooae003.].

OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study was to investigate the prevalence of missed nursing care and its associated factors among public hospitals in Bahir Dar City, Northwest Ethiopia. DESIGN: An institution-based cross-sectional study was conducted among 369 randomly selected nurses. SETTING: The study was conducted in primary and secondary-level public hospitals in Bahir Dar City. PARTICIPANTS: Nurses who had worked in hospitals in Bahir Dar City were included...

BACKGROUND: Technological advancement has led to the growth and rapid increase of tuberculosis (TB) medical data generated from different health care areas, including diagnosis. Prioritizing better adoption and acceptance of innovative diagnostic technology to reduce the spread of TB significantly benefits developing countries. Trained TB-detection rats are used in Tanzania and Ethiopia for operational research to complement other TB diagnostic tools. This technology has increased new TB case detection owing to its speed, cost-effectiveness, and sensitivity...

BACKGROUND: People seeking abortion in early pregnancy have the choice between medication and procedural options for care. The choice is preference-sensitive-there is no clinically superior option and the choice depends on what matters most to the individual patient. Patient decision aids (PtDAs) are shared decision-making tools that support people in making informed, values-aligned health care choices. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to develop and evaluate the usability of a web-based PtDA for the Canadian context, where abortion care is publicly funded and available without legal restriction...

Despite the increasing relevance of statistics in health sciences, teaching styles in higher education are remarkably similar across disciplines: lectures covering the theory and methods, followed by application and computer exercises in given data sets. This often leads to challenges for students in comprehending fundamental statistical concepts essential for medical research. To address these challenges, we propose an engaging learning approach-DICE (design, interpret, compute, estimate)-aimed at enhancing the learning experience of statistics in public health and epidemiology...

OBJECTIVES: A data commons is a software platform for managing, curating, analyzing, and sharing data with a community. The Pandemic Response Commons (PRC) is a data commons designed to provide a data platform for researchers studying an epidemic or pandemic. METHODS: The PRC was developed using the open source Gen3 data platform and is based upon consortium, data, and platform agreements developed by the not-for-profit Open Commons Consortium. A formal consortium of Chicagoland area organizations was formed to develop and operate the PRC...

OBJECTIVES: This study aimed to develop healthcare data marketplace using blockchain-based B2C model that ensures the transaction of healthcare data among individuals, companies, and marketplaces. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We designed an architecture for the healthcare data marketplace using blockchain. A healthcare data marketplace was developed using Panacea, MySQL 8.0, JavaScript library, and Node.js. We evaluated the performance of the data marketplace system in 3 scenarios...

BACKGROUNDS: With the advent of the big data era, hospital information systems and mobile care systems, among others, generate massive amounts of medical data. Data mining, as a powerful information processing technology, can discover non-obvious information by processing large-scale data and analyzing them in multiple dimensions. How to find the effective information hidden in the database and apply it to nursing clinical practice has received more and more attention from nursing researchers...

Community health workers are responsible for finding, processing, and transferring health information to communities with limited access to health-related resources, including farmworkers. This paper is the culmination of an undergraduate student research project to explore the learning processes and preferences of farmworker-serving community health workers in the USA. The project was designed for students from farmworker or agricultural backgrounds at two North Carolina universities and was supported by a North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services workforce development grant...

OBJECTIVE: Define the modes of procedure of the Deductive Care Methodology (DCM) in the generation of knowledge about person's health care. METHODOLOGY: Design and test of the DCM modes based on three phases: mapping of the MDC, generation of models from this methodology and testing of the models through studies in a clinical context. RESULTS: The MDC presents five levels of abstraction with three modes broken down to 16 types. The modes are: Philosophical Mode to conceptualize and obtain generalities about reality, Mathematical Mode to operate with generalities, and Physical Mode to operationally verify, validating the results and the predictive capacity of the model...

Unlocking the full potential of digital public health (DiPH) systems requires a comprehensive tool to assess their maturity. While the World Health Organization and the International Telecommunication Union released a toolkit in 2012 covering various aspects of digitalizing national healthcare systems, a holistic maturity assessment tool has been lacking ever since. To bridge this gap, we conducted a pioneering Delphi study, to which 54 experts from diverse continents and academic fields actively contributed to at least one of three rounds...

OBJECTIVE: Firearm violence constitutes a public health crisis in the United States, but comprehensive data infrastructure is lacking to study this problem. To address this challenge, we used natural language processing (NLP) to classify court record documents from alleged violent crimes as firearm-related or non-firearm-related. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We accessed and digitized court records from the state of Washington (n = 1472). Human review established a gold standard label for firearm involvement (yes/no)...

OBJECTIVES: Clinical practice guideline (CPG) developers conduct systematic summaries of research evidence, providing them great capacity and ability to identify research priorities. We systematically analysed the reporting form and content of research priorities in CPGs related to knee osteoarthritis (KOA) to provide a valuable reference for guideline developers and clinicians. DESIGN: A methodological literature analysis was done and the characteristics of the reporting form and the content of the research priorities identified in KOA CPGs were summarised...

OBJECTIVES: To map the current use of paper-based and/or screen-based media for health education aimed at older people. DESIGN: A scoping review was reported following the Preferred Reporting Items of Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses for Scoping Reviews checklist. DATA SOURCES: The search was carried out in seven databases (Scopus, Web of Science, Embase, Medline, CINAHL, ACM Guide to Computing Literature, PsycINFO), with studies available from 2012 to the date of the search in 2022, in English, Portuguese, Italian or Spanish...

BACKGROUND: The digital health divide for socioeconomic disadvantage describes a pattern in which patients considered socioeconomically disadvantaged, who are already marginalized through reduced access to face-to-face health care, are additionally hindered through less access to patient-initiated digital health. A comprehensive understanding of how patients with socioeconomic disadvantage access and experience digital health is essential for improving the digital health divide. Primary care patients, especially those with chronic disease, have experience of the stages of initial help seeking and self-management of their health, which renders them a key demographic for research on patient-initiated digital health access...

BACKGROUND: The opioid crisis continues to pose significant challenges to global public health, necessitating the development of novel interventions to support individuals in managing their substance use and preventing overdose-related deaths. Mobile health (mHealth), as a promising platform for addressing opioid use disorder, requires a comprehensive understanding of user perspectives to minimize barriers to care and optimize the benefits of mHealth interventions. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to synthesize qualitative insights into opioid users' acceptability and perceived efficacy of mHealth and wearable technologies for opioid use disorder...

BACKGROUND: The digitalization of public and health sectors worldwide is fundamentally changing health systems. With the implementation of digital health services in health institutions, a focus on digital health literacy and the use of digital health services have become more evident. In Denmark, public institutions use digital tools for different purposes, aiming to create a universal public digital sector for everyone. However, this digitalization risks reducing equity in health and further marginalizing citizens who are disadvantaged...

This viewpoint aims to provide a comprehensive understanding of vaping from various perspectives that contribute to the invention, development, spread, and consequences of e-cigarette products and vaping. Our analysis showed that the specific characteristics of e-cigarette products as well as marketing strategies, especially social media marketing, fostered the spread of vaping and the subsequent effects on human health and toxicity. We analyzed the components of e-cigarette devices and e-liquids, including the latest variants whose impacts were often overlooked...